


The Long Way Around

by ehmazing



Category: Motorcity
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-08
Updated: 2012-08-08
Packaged: 2017-11-11 16:53:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/480731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ehmazing/pseuds/ehmazing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Julie was five when she left Detroit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Long Way Around

Julie was five when she left Detroit.

It was a cold night, she remembered. A bodyguard had carried her to a private tram. Her mother’s bed had already been loaded into the car, medical equipment hastily packed in crates and clustered around her like a set of toy building blocks. She had crawled under the covers and shivered against her mother’s side, watching the colored fluids drip down their tubes until they disappeared under the band on her mother’s wrist.

“We’re only moving, baby,” her mother had said. “Just for a little while.”

Indeed, they were. Julie watched the dark silhouette of Detroit fade behind them through the tram windows.

“Where’s Daddy?”

“He’s staying behind.” Her mother's sheets were warm. Julie closed her eyes, lulled by the rocking of the tram. “He’s going to clean up the city. Just for a little while.”

\--

The Detroit Julie left had needed cleaning. People didn’t go outside without a mask to keep out the exhaust. Sometimes they’d be shut in for days, steel-plated doors quivering when the dust storms rolled through. Lake Erie was brackish, a reflection of a sky the color of mud. 

She didn’t remember when her mother got sick. Maybe she had always been.

“It’s the air,” the doctors told them. “It’s weakening her lungs. She needs to be treated somewhere else; Detroit will only make it worse.”

Her father had called them the following morning, voice distorted from the holoscreen speakers. It almost sounded like a growl.

“How are my girls?” Julie didn’t pay much attention to her parents’ small talk. She pressed her face to the tram windows and counted the twisted remains of skyscrapers as they passed.

“Now, Julie Bear, be good,” her father had said. Static flickered across the holoscreen. “When your new house is all set up, Daddy will come and visit.”

But he never did.

\--

The first new house was in the mountains. Her mother had a bird feeder outside of her bedroom window, and Julie would sit with her, nature book in lap, flipping through the pages and praying to see a red-bellied woodpecker. 

She started school that fall, and the kids in her kindergarten class all wore old, faded clothes that didn’t fit. As did their parents, who picked them up in rusted, ancient trucks. Julie’s bodyguard drove her to school.

Her father sent her a robot, a little round silver globe that hovered near her shoulder and could sharpen pencils. Julie brought it to Show-and-Tell, but didn’t take it out of her backpack. Her classmates passed around pressed flowers, an antique quilt, radishes grown on the family farm. All of them came from families who had hard lives in the mountains, living on small plots because their cities had burned. A lot of cities had burned, a long time ago, and people were still trying to rebuild them.

When Julie’s teacher came to her desk and asked if she had anything to share, she shook her head, her lips pressed tight.

\--

She was eight when they moved to the second new house, and this time she didn’t sleep on the tram. She watched the landscape turn browner and browner as they headed south.

The desert house had a flat roof with a trapdoor, and Julie spent nearly every night hunched over a star chart with a flashlight in hand. Her father sent her a telescope with a lens bigger than a dinner plate, and Julie marked the positions of Ursa Major and Orion.

Her mother always politely declined Julie’s requests to visit the roof with her. “It’s a long walk up there for me, baby,” she laughed. She had starting wearing a tube in her nose, and an oxygen tank had joined the arsenal surrounding her bed. “I don’t know if I could make it back down.”

So Julie plotted the stars alone.

\--

For her tenth birthday, her father sent her a bright yellow robot.

“Thank you, Daddy,” she told him over the holoscreen, “but I wanted a real kitten.”

“I know, sweetheart,” her father sighed, “but you might be allergic to a real kitten. And this one doesn’t scratch!”

There was another present accompanying the robokitten: a man named Dae-Hyun who would give her self-defense lessons.

“But is that really necessary?” her mother asked her father; Julie had her ear pressed the wall from the next room, robokitten batting at her shoelaces. “We have the bodyguards and the agents and the sentries and the security system--”

“Things aren’t going like I planned,” her father said. “There are still resistance efforts going on. Gangs, drug lords, riffraff. I have them cornered in the old city, but you never know what they could do. I want her prepared.”

Julie liked Dae-Hyun. He gave Julie candy when she mastered a kick or a hit, smiling and saying she reminded him of his own daughter at that age. The robokitten broke down when a dog chased it into their swimming pool, but Julie didn’t mind much. It was always mewling whenever it needed to be charged.

\--

Their fastest move was between the fourth and fifth new houses. Her mother had started coughing a day after they moved into the fourth.

“It’s only the dust,” she said, waving the nurse off. “Once everything’s unpacked and cleaned I’ll be fine.”

But two weeks after the last box was put away, her mother was still coughing. The doctors put more tubes into her wrists. A whole rainbow cascaded down into her mother’s thin veins.

One morning the housekeeper woke Julie up. Her things had already been packed. Her mother was waiting in her bed on the tram. Julie sat next to her and took her hand. Her mother’s wristbones protruded like knobs against her pale skin.

“Daddy wants us to move a little closer so that I can get better,” her mother said. When she coughed, Julie could see tiny flecks of blood dot the front of her shirt. “He says he’ll come and visit.”

Julie didn’t believe her.

\--

Her mother died when she was fourteen, after two months in their ninth new house. Julie stood at the grave with the bodyguards, her mother’s nurse, and the cook. 

Afterward, she locked herself in her room and did something she had never done before: she called her father. She counted the pulses of the holoscreen with deep breaths, planning what she’d say. She’d say he missed the funeral. She’d say she didn’t want to move again. She’d say what good is cleaning a city anymore, when the woman who needed clean air to get better never did?

“Kane Co., Cadet Chilton,” answered the boy.

“Uh,” said Julie. She twisted her hands behind her back and tried to sound commanding. “I need to speak with Mr. Kane, right now.”

“Mr. Kane is meeting with the board of defense administrators. Is it urgent?”

Her courage sapped from her as she thought of how this call would really go. She thought of her father bending over the holoscreen, brows knitted with annoyance. _What is it, Julie? Daddy’s busy right now._

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

“What? Hello? Who is--” She slapped her hand on the End Call button. 

She slept in her mother’s bed that night. The sheets were cold.

\--

Julie was sixteen when she came back to Detroit, but she might as well have moved to the surface of the moon. Gone was the smog, the grit, the dirt. Her father’s new city was polished and pristine, every brick the image of what a utopia should be.

Julie took her first breath of perfect, filtered air and grimaced at the taste.

Her father was much bigger than Julie thought he would be. Weren’t your parents supposed to shrink as you grew? But Abraham Kane towered over her still, eleven years since she had last seen him in person.

He opened his arms and Julie hugged him. Up close, she could see the gray hairs dotting his beard, the lines on his forehead, the blemishes the holoscreen had hidden.

“Welcome home,” her father said. Julie had never felt so far from it.

**Author's Note:**

> This is probably all gonna get jossed, but Julie and Kane's relationship strikes me as one between two people who didn't spend a lot of time caring about what the other was doing.


End file.
